The West Is Facing An Islamic Holy War

A documentary film released this weekend in more than 100 movie theaters across America explores the processes by which antisemitism exploded across university campuses, in street demonstrations and on social media following the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

It shows how throughout this vast uprising, Hamas have been celebrated as freedom fighters rather than terrorists. The film's director, Wendy Sachs, has also noted that this tsunami of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred wasn't a spontaneous eruption of feeling. It was orchestrated.

The Hamas narrative of murderous lies has been embedded into campuses by the vicious anti-Israel group, Students for Justice in Palestine. The film produces evidence that links SJP to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamist group that spawned Hamas, ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

Sachs says she was shocked and surprised to discover that SJP wasn't just another student group but connected to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.

What was most mind-blowing, she said, was the revelation from 1993 when the FBI wiretapped Hamas members in a Philadelphia hotel room and recorded them talking "about how to make their messaging more palatable to an American audience and how when they're speaking to people on the left, they're going to speak in terms of social justice and apartheid."

Which, of course, is precisely what's been carried out to devastating effect. And these activists aren't just aiming to destroy Israel and murder Jews. They're aiming to destroy America.

Last September, SJP tweeted: "True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself," and that its aim was "to undermine and eradicate America as we know it."

This aim is no secret. Jihadi warriors from both the Sunni and Shi'ite Islamic world in Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have repeatedly threatened that, after they have destroyed Israel and the Jews, they're coming for the West.

That's why the uproar over the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil--the Syrian-born student agitator who orchestrated the anti-Israel mayhem at Columbia University and now faces losing his green card and being deported--is so profoundly ill-judged.

Democrats and other liberal useful idiots have been screaming that that Khalil is being persecuted for expressing his support for "Palestine." This is rubbish. He's a foreign visitor who organized a violent takeover of campus with Hamas-linked activities and who conspired to commit civil-rights violations.

The protests against his arrest aren't just morally bankrupt. They also obscure the fact that Khalil and his ilk are active participants in a highly organized Islamist uprising against the West. Western liberals who think such people are supporting the "oppressed Palestinians" have been played for suckers.

People in the West are constantly being shocked by developments inspired by the Islamic world. They were shocked by the Oct. 7 atrocities. They have been shocked by the violent "pro-Gaza" demonstrations. They have been shocked by the recent terrible scenes from Syria.

Those scenes are indeed beyond horrifying. Christians, Druze and Alawites--supporters of the deposed president, Basher al Assad, who himself caused the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians--have been subjected to barbaric mass slaughter by the new Islamist government.

Christians have been crucified, tied to boards with their arms extended and then had their brains blown out. Men have been forced to crawl on the ground before being shot. Bodies of Christians and Druze have been dragged through the streets.

But we've seen this same kind of depravity before. We saw it in the Oct. 7 attacks in which Israeli babies, children, women and men were slaughtered, raped, beheaded, burned alive and kidnapped to be dragged through Gaza's streets, starved, tortured and murdered.

We saw it in the atrocities committed by ISIS, who in 2016 burned 19 Yazidi women to death in cages after they refused to have sex with their captors.

And we've seen it in the systematic persecution of Christians across Africa. For many years, Islamists have been targeting Christians through beheadings, rapes, abductions and being burned alive. In recent years, thousands of Christians have been slaughtered, forcibly converted to Islam, kidnapped for ransom or sexual enslavement, and driven out of their homes.

In 2020, an emergency meeting convened by experts in religious freedom at the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Fla., recorded that over the past decade, more Christians had been murdered for their faith by Islamic extremists in Nigeria's northern and central belts than in the whole of the Middle East.

More than 2,000 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria since 2018, with nearly two-dozen Christians there beheaded in 2020 by local Boko Haram militants, some with direct links to ISIS.

In eastern Kenya, extremists extracted Christians from a public bus and executed them on the spot. Last month, 70 Christians were found beheaded in a church in Congo.

And so on, and so on. Evidence like this has been there for all with eyes to see for decades. Yet people have refused to see it because they refuse to acknowledge the enormity of what's happening to our world. They refuse to realize that what's taking place both at home and abroad is all part of the same thing--holy war to conquer the world for Islam.

The Palestinian cause is being used as a wedge issue to weaponize Western antisemitism against Israel and the Jews, whose destruction is viewed as an essential front in the wider war against the West, Christianity and the entire non-Islamic world.

In the West itself, this war is being waged by the Muslim Brotherhood--a covert, Sunni Muslim group aiming at global Islamic domination. The Brotherhood shrewdly calibrates its activities to vary between terrorist violence and the subversion of Western societies through immigration and a high birthrate, political entryism and intimidation.

A report published in 2020 by the British think tank Policy Exchange noted that the Brotherhood's goal is "to capture power in order to make governance more Islamic" and to "seek to mobilize Muslims behind an agenda of communalism, sustained by a narrative of grievance and victimhood, in the service of an ideology that at its heart contests the legitimate foundations of the modern Western state."

Shia Iran is also intent on Islamizing the rest of the world. In Britain, alarm by the security service over potentially violent Iranian infiltration has reached such heights that all organizations connected to the regime in Tehran are now required to register with British authorities.

Yet even now, the British government refuses to ban the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Muslim Brotherhood. Across the West, governments and the public alike persist in a state of lethal timidity and denial.

There have been no massive street demonstrations against the Syrian atrocities. There have been no protests at the massacres of Christians, not even by the church itself. The war to destroy Christianity across Africa and Asia is never even mentioned. The only outrage is against Israel for defending itself against these horrors.

Why is this? In part, it's through ignorance about the Middle East and Jewish history. In part, it's antisemitism. In part, it's the pernicious belief that people with brown or black skins can never be criticized--even when they are slaughtering others with brown or black skins. In part, it's through simple fear and funk.

It's also because it busts the narrative about Israeli "colonization" and reveals instead that there is a massive worldwide problem with Islam.

The West won't accept that it's facing an Islamic holy war because it believes it can't win against the world's 1.8 billion Muslims. So it's giving up without even putting up a fight, sheltering instead behind the comforting fiction that if Israel behaved differently everything would be absolutely fine.

It needs instead to take off its blinders, join up the dots and fight like Israel to survive.

Originally published at JNS.org